Reading Saving Paradise, Chapter 14 - Part I

The struggle for paradise

Many 19th century Christians hoped to return to the North American Eden that their own colonizing had destroyed.  Their efforts shaped American society in enduring ways – generating movements for conservation, women’s suffrage, the New Deal, and Civil Rights.  In their struggles to preserve the beauty of the natural world and uphold the dignity of all human beings, they dismantled doctrines of redemptive violence, and challenged the idea that God divides the world into the elect and the damned.  

At the dawn of the 21st century, North American Christians are still engaged in the struggle for paradise.  Popular forms of Christianity that look to heaven in ‘the world to come’ and embrace redemptive violence have become a major political voice; but the paradise they offer waits for the end of the world – and they believe God’s plan is to destroy this earth and rapture a select few into heaven. 

American beauty

Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

When Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was painting his landscapes, the primeval forests of New England had all been felled.  Cole, now known as the father of American landscape painters, viewed the natural world as a divine textbook. He sought to display moral struggles through the mirror of nature.  His goal as an artist was to call people to awakening – and he saw his richly shaded canvases, light on one side and dark on the other, as a ‘battleground for the warfare of good and evil.’ 

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), whose  Walden remains an all-time best-seller, searched for the wilderness his own Puritan forebears had razed. For Thoreau, the wilderness was America’s salvation; only by connecting to its renewing purity and freedom American society escape from its sins.  He noted that the word ‘sauntering’ comes from ‘Sainte-Terrer’ (a pilgrim to the holy land): ‘For every walk is a sort of crusade….to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land  from the hands of the Infidels…’

Some members of Thoreau’s circle sought to realize the ideal of a natural life by living in communities devoted to agriculture, spirituality, leisure, and social reform.  There were more than 100 of these Utopian efforts in the 19th century.   Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was invited to join one of these Utopian efforts, but declined as did Thoreau.  (Each was too allergic to ‘society’ to want to join even a Utopian one.)  Emerson abandoned any idea of a traditional Calvinist divinity and became a writer and lecturer, writing, 

In the woods, we return to reason and faith…. 

I become a transparent eyeball; 

I am nothing; I see all; 

the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; 

I am part or parcel of God.

Emerson’s  essay Nature was an evangelist’s call; but his view of nature was typical of the American romanticism that idealized the ‘wild,’ but also sought to dominate it.  (He thought the true position of ‘nature in regard to man’ was akin to women’s position with regard to men; nature had little value in itself, but attained value as it reflected and supported man.  He argued for the rights of American Indians and opposed slavery, but he thought the inequality between races was an indication that ‘some should lead, and some should serve.’  While he wrote On Self-Reliance he was depending on the support and care of his wife, mother-in-law, three servants, and a gardener – thanks to wealth inherited from his first wife.)

In many ways, the wilderness conservationists of the 19th century still inspire today’s environmental movements.  But capitalist growth and environmentally unsound practices continue to the present day.  

Christians have also had difficulty combining their commitments to global justice and peace with environmental responsibility. When commitments to environmental issues are strong, discussions of racism and sexism are often absent; where commitments to justice and nonviolence are strong, environmental issues are often neglected.  And our nostalgic visions of nature and wilderness still disconnect us from the everyday consumerism that causes cumulative harm to our environments.

Ever since Calvin located ‘Paradise’ on his map of the world, his spiritual descendents have sought to locate paradise – or construct it – in this world.  But as long as Christians imagine paradise as a place of purification and salvation – the ultimate and final separation of the pristine from the corrupt – our visions of paradise will only separate us from the present with its complex demands.

But Brock and Parker assert,   Life is actually sustained…. by integration, interaction, and exchange in the present – it is ecological, not eschatological.  To change ourselves and our environments, we will require a spiritual discipline of being aware of our actions, moment to moment, to change what feeds the engines of destruction. (see p. 388)

A generous justice

According to Brock and Parker, modern commitments to God’s generous justice and love began with the Universalists, whose roots extend back to 17th century England, in the writings of Jane Leade (1624-1704), who offered a spiritual vision of paradise as a realm in this life. 

In America, Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1815) published a catechism for parents, writing that the Lord’ Supper should not be an ‘figure of the sufferings of the Redeemer,’ but  a ‘gathering together of the many grains.’  The Eucharist should celebrate the connectedness of all human beings now and to come – none should be left outside.  Sargent (along with her husband John Murray) rejected the Great Awakening’s ideas about the wrath of God, the transcendent distance of heaven, and predestination to salvation or damnation. As she questioned social hierarchies based on gender distinctions, Sargent Murray became one of America’s earliest advocates for women’s equality and right to education. 

A century later, Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) rejected the idea of an angry God who needed to be appeased by his son’s suffering.  Ballou observed that Christians who believed in a violent God resorted to violence and thought themselves justified. But to believe violence could be Christian was to doubt the power of God’s love to save the world. Ballou became a leading proponent of Christian Universalism, believing that no matter how much sin and death abounded, grace was greater.  Nothing humanity might do could overcome the loving, generous grace of God. 

The Universalist alternative to atonement theology emphasized God’s all-embracing love and the beauty of Christ, who drew people to acts of justice and mercy, and to happiness.  True happiness lay in seeking it not only for oneself but for every human being.

By the middle of the 19th century, Universalism was flourishing, especially among poor and middle-income whites in small towns and rural areas.  Universalist Christians embodied their faith by working for social changes that rejected redemptive violence and expressed God’s love for all souls.  They advocated for women’s rights and were an early denomination to ordain women.  They worked to abolish slavery, and Universalist churches were often stops on the Underground Railroad through which runaway slaves were led to freedom.  They opposed capital punishment and organized prison reforms.  They promoted Christian pacifism.

Many 19th century Christians came to reject the doctrine of the atonement and its sanctification of bloodshed.  Instead of focusing on personal sins, Theodore Parker (1810-1860) understood sin in transpersonal ways.  Parker believed social evils were sustained by four powerful social systems: economics, politics, education, and organized religion. As an alternative to atonement theology, 19th century Christians drew on the first chapters of Genesis to reassert the idea that salvation restored the imago dei (image of God) in humanity.  Rooted in Methodist ‘holiness movements’ and radical religious groups such as the Quakers and Shakers, women claimed they were authorized by the indwelling Spirit of God to live in freedom and dignity, to manifest their having been created in the image of God.  Imago dei theology inspired movements for abolition, prison reform and peace, as well as for women’s rights. 

An emerging intellectual movement, moral philosophy, also developed an imago dei theology.  William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) preached that the human capacities for reason, affection, imagination, will creativity, and moral conscience reflected the imago dei.  Some of Channing’s parishioners applied his imago dei preaching to a range of issues – women’s rights, early childhood education, free public education for all children, protesting Indian removal and abolition of slavery.  (But when Channing himself finally took a strong and public anti-slavery stand the year before his death, he lost his pulpit.) 

Channing’s caution in publicly supporting abolition was typical of elite white Christians, who advocated some social reforms, but balked at others that would disrupt their privileged status.  Imago dei theology can go only so far in fostering human solidarity and changing power dynamics.  Such theologies assume that individuals seeing others as like themselves provide an adequate basis for human community – whereas true community requires recognizing others both as alike and other, distinct and valuable in their differences.

In response to critiques of redemptive violence from Universalists and Unitarians, some Christians reasserted the doctrine of the blood atonement. Congregationalist Howard Bushnell (1802-1876) thought that Ballou, Parker and Channing had gone too far.  Bushnell felt that humanity, frozen in hard-heartedness and selfishness, could be moved by the warm-blooded passion of God’s vicarious suffering.  Christ’s sacrifice on the cross could save souls by drawing them to become like him, burdened in sorrow and pain by the sufferings of others.  Imago dei theology saw humans as Godlike in their capacities for empathy, agency, and generosity – powers that should be used to assist the downtrodden and oppressed. 

Christian reformers understood themselves to be those with power, which they were to use to lift up the less powerful.  But a theology which emphasized God’s benevolent paternalism blessed whites who emotionally identified with black suffering, and praised men who sympathized with women’s subjugation.  It valorized the privileged who found wholeness by connecting with the poor. 

Benevolent paternalism reasserted the centrality of Christ’s crucifixion as an image of compassion but also protected white supremacy.  Bushnell and many other elite liberals wanted a nurturing, co-suffering God; but while showing compassion for the victims of their systems of power, they still retained the illusion of their own superiority.  Writing of blacks, Bushnell wrote, “Nothing can save the inferior race but a steady and pliant assimilation.” 

Moral clarity about evil and sin

Since the 10th century, Christian theology has often seen torment as redemptive, war as holy, invasion as liberation, and self-annihilation as love.  But living justly in this world requires people to name evil and sin accurately. 

In the early 20th century, an astute analysis of evil was offered by ‘Social Gospel” Christians, who believed the purpose of Christian life was to “bring in the Kingdom of God.” 

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) believed that personal salvation for individual souls after death was not the point of Christian faith. Rauschenbusch’s Theology for the Social Gospel criticized Christian ideas that sanctioned war, racism, imperialism, economic injustice, and exploitation of the earth’s natural resources. 

Sin mattered not because it disappointed or offended God but because it disrupted relationships of love and justice.  For Rauschenbusch, selfishness was the root of all sin, and evangelical revivalism was selfish.  Viewing sin as individual failing alone was inadequate. 

The death of Jesus did not redeem humanity from its sins.  Rather, it revealed the character of collective sins – what Rauschenbusch called “transpersonal evil.” He listed six kinds of sin that had combined to kill Jesus:

• Religious bigotry
• Graft and political power
• A corrupt legal system
• Mob spirit and mob action
• Militarism
• Class contempt and class divisions

For Rauschenbusch, God was “the ground of social unity” and not the God of only one group or one nation.  He objected to forms of Christianity in which “full moral obligation stopped at the religious boundary line.”  But even while he called for solidarity, he saw racism as a southern problem.  As a German Baptist pastor in New York, he did not befriend black ministers.  Another Baptist pastor would press his vision forward beyond segregation – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Please continue reading on the next post,

“The Stone of Hope”